So I’ve recently vanished from the face of this blog due to exams once again. Never again will I underestimate how much biochemistry there really is (read: over 100 hand written pages of biochem study notes). Regardless, I am now free to relax a bit and update the blog once again! Onto business I suppose.
First things first, since the last rogowski coil update, I haven’t gotten it functioning properly yet. I suspect its due to the fact that I foolishly omitted any form of burden resistor (standard practice with current transducers is to place a resistor of a few ohms to a few hundred to reduce the voltage output). The opamps may be fried, however I have hope that they are still functioning, and as such I will try to modify the integrator to work…
Moving on, tons of projects for the summer:
- The capacitor bank: I have done some more work on it, reconfiguring the SCR pucks to parallel and the stud diodes to antiparallel to both increase the current capacity (each puck at about 5.5kA for 8.3ms, derate for maybe 8-9kA) and catch all the ringing. My previous design would have failed spectacularly since the configuration was essentially a boost converter with nowhere for voltage to go.
- I’ve been fiddling with a tiny ZVS flyback driver I built, unfortunately the capacitor I had on hand was insufficient, so at some point I will have to do a revisit.
- I’ve acquired 3x 1W solar panels for $9 a piece, and they’ll provide just enough power to trickle charge a SLA battery, granted its nothing much but every bit counts, especially if you want to go QRP with a small radio and limited power supply for amateur radio.
- Plans for a 3 tesla coil symphony using polyphonic MIDI driven by Ableton Live + a multichannel sound card.
- A few arduino projects including a voltage/current meter and a MIDI control surface 9either mixer style or DJ style).
- A simple analog signal switcher (ie: powered by 4051 CMOS) or mixer to combine audio outputs from devices to a computer, and a complementary mini-mixer to buffer/isolate audio input from a computer to devices.
Procrastinatus 